Through 70 years of development, South China's Guangdong province has developed from an economically backward agricultural province in 1949, when the People's Republic of China was founded, to a province whose economic aggregate has ranked first in the country for 30 consecutive years.

Its GDP rose from 2.03 billion yuan ($285.23 million) in 1949 and 18.56 billion in 1978 to 9.73 trillion yuan in 2018. The proportion of its GDP in the country's total went up from 4.3 percent in 1952 to 10.8 percent in 2018.